A place where I'll post up some thoughts and ideas - especially on literature in education, children's literature in general, poetry, reading, writing, teaching and thoughts on current affairs.

Wednesday, 28 September 2016

"Listen to people's concerns about immigration'? You mean concerns you created!

There is level of hypocrisy and two-faced conning going on over migration.

On the one hand, politicians want migrants to come to help them balance the books. They want young, strong, clever people to come to Britain to work on building sites, run the transport system, health service, work in new industries and work on farms and in the food industry. The taxes migrants pay, pay my state pension. It definitely isn't my NIC that's paid for it. That was spent years ago.

Meanwhile, governments Labour and Tory have failed to welcome and trumpet this replenishment to the economy. They have failed to make provision for the arrivals by building, renewing and expanding the social housing stock - council homes. Why should those brave Caribbeans of the 1950s and 1960s, say, who came to work on the building sites and in transport and health (in particular) have had to put up with the lousy, rack-rented housing of, say, Paddington? What horrible trick was it, to get them to come, to build up the post-war economy and say to them: 'You can go and live in the worst housing in London. Tough on you!'

If that wasn't bad enough, we then get the same politicians - or their heirs - saying, 'We must listen to people's concerns about immigration'!!! Where do these concerns come from? They come from the fact that you politicians didn't make provision, you didn't trumpet the contribution the migrants have made and go on making. You just thought you'd get that contribution at the cheapest possible price to the Exchequer. You politicians created the conditions in which people 'have concerns'.

And if that wasn't bad enough (!) you have oafs and liars like Boris Johnson who hope that by constantly flirting with racist or near-racist words and phrases, they can conjure up votes and popularity. 'Good old Boris. He tells it how it is.'

Nearly every racist, every anti-migrant, every scapegoater in history has done it in order to win or secure power - a power that ends up in repression for everyone. The issue of migration or the 'racially inferior' or any such, is a means to an end: power. And when power is won, the repression required to move migrants about, to select and segregate people becomes (or even starts out as) a repression of all.

One story from history: the Nazis got to power in part by saying that 'the Jews' were the cause of Germany's problems arising out of the First World War and the uprisings within Germany by Communists and Socialists. 'The Jews' were, they said, behind both. This was one of the ways that they won power - legally through the ballot box.

The first political acts they took were against everyone - not the Jews. They were the Reichstag Decree and the Enabling Acts. The effect of these was the end of political parties, the end of a free press, the beginnings of martial law, the locking up of the leaders of the Communist and Socialist Parties, the locking of trade unionists. Acts against 'the Jews' came very soon after. The first concentration camp - Dachau - was for Communists, Socialists, trade unionists and dissidents.

The racism directed at the Jews was one of the means by which the Nazis won power, one of the means by which they could re-shape democratic politics into a dictatorship and a totalitarian state, and a way in which they could re-shape the economy so that it was free of any organisation which could fight for better wages, better conditions, pensions and holidays. Racism was used as a means by which they could attack everyone bar the army, the small business people, non-Jewish professionals, and the super-rich.